Apple Sued For Man's Porn Addiction 509
coolnumbr12 writes "Chris Sevier, a 36-year-old man from Tennessee, got so addicted to porn videos that his wife took his children and left him. Now he has sued Apple saying the company failed to install any filter in its devices to prevent his addiction. In a 50-page complaint, Sevier calls Apple a 'silent poisoner' responsible for the proliferation of 'arousal addiction, sex trafficking, prostitution, and countless numbers of destroyed lives.' Sevier is seeking damages from Apple, but said he we will drop the lawsuit if Apple agrees to sell devices with a 'safe mode.'"
Re:What? (Score:0, Insightful)
whenever my wife does this, i use beer and sports as my behavior modifier.
chicks are attention whores, take it away and they will do anything to get it back
Re:False Flag (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because he's insane doesn't mean there's no religious group behind the lawsuit.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
- The fact that SO MANY people have no ability to take any responsibility for their actions and the fact that people don't overwhelmingly blast them for their insane helplessness seems to be some level of proof that humans have no evolved traits for any self responsibility. I would expect that self responsibility would have to be part of any sort of evolved survival traits.
(or maybe we need to release more tigers in our cities to get the old awareness going again...)
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
If I am on a jury, and I hear "Addicted to porn", I'm going to have a really hard time remaining objective about the person speaking.
As such I'd probably get thrown off the jury and people who actually BELIEVE THIS SHIT will take my place.
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
If this continues, every item sold within the US is going to have a 89-page disclaimer.
I believe Apple already serves this with every iTunes update.
Case dismissed!
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember a time when people were expected to take responsibility for their own actions. The world was a much better place then.
Now everyone who engages in anti-social / psychopathic behavior is a "victim". We blame government. We blame society. And best of all, we blame inanimate objects. But under no circumstances can we point out that the guy actually chose to behave in the way he did, and that he is entirely, 100% to blame for the situation he finds himself in.
(I'm not saying that viewing pornography is "in general" anti-social behavior, however, within the context of the boundaries of his marriage, it apparently qualified.)
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal responsibility is an invented concept driven by societal needs. Fundamental evolution doesn't work well with the concept. In fact shuffling responsibility onto others and suckering them into dealing with it is a fantastic survival strategy we can see throughout the animal kingdom.
Parental controls (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been built-in for years. The problem is that a person with a problem isn't going to use them to restrict himself.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that? It's pretty thematic through out the whole ID debate. Acceptance in spite of investigation and evidence to the contrary. That is the epitome of a lazy and entitled attitude IMHO.
That being said, fuck yeah, bring on the tigers.
Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
I too am a recovering porn addict. 15 months 'sober.' There is much that could be discussed about the causes of, and methods of overcoming, a porn addiction, but blaming the manufacturers of devices is ludicrous. My last look at porn was on an iPad - which I no longer have.
With statistics showing that 50% or more of men now look at porn regularly, porn addiction is a pretty big deal. And no - it's not just a religious sort of thing. It's a ruining marriage, losing job, lost productivity, wasted time and money and quality of life sort of thing.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up, was just gonna say this.
Evolution doesn't give a damn how much of an irresponsible moron you are, only how much you reproduce. And irresponsible morons are especially good at that.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Which type of people do you think procreate the most; people with or without a sense of responsibility?
There are whole MTV shows dedicated to demonstrating this principle of evolution.
Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
It involves taking responsibility,
Unfortunately, this is now seen as an archaic notion, which has no place in our "modern" and "enlightened" society.
We must blame all problems on inanimate objects, or else we run the risk of someone feeling bad.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are selfish and self-serving like no other species can be.
Sure... if by "like no other species can be" you mean "exactly like every other species is".
Re:Not his fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to both of you for sharing this - I think it's an important point of view not often heard. A porn addiction can cause as much trouble as addiction to alcohol or controlled substances, and it is even more ubiquitous - you can always find it for free, and without ever being seen in public.
But this guy's case is without merit. It's like suing a grocery store for selling liquor to an alcoholic. I'm sorry, but personal responsibility here is the answer.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, he had kids already, evolution says he's doing better than any of us who don't have kids.
Re:False Flag (Score:4, Insightful)
That explains a lot about the state of the world.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
but seriously we don't blame the heroine or meth for a junkie becoming a junkie.
We do, however, blame the guy standing on the street corner handing out free samples of dope trying to get people hooked.
I blame them for being less perfect than I am, just like this dude is.
FTFY. Humans are an imperfect animal with build in chemical and psychological pathways that can lead to dependency on many different kinds of things. Some people have had enough support early in their lives that they haven't made bad decisions that lead them down the bad pathways; some people haven't. That doesn't make the person pathetic or weak or even simple, it just makes him human.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason and faith are only incompatible when they intersect to the detriment of the former. There's plenty of stuff that could logically exist that we have no evidence for, and possibly never will. You can select an outcome in those cases and they would have to be based on faith.
And as for everything else, most people without recourse to proper equipment or resources have to take many of the more obscure scientific theories on faith. Some people do not, and that is how you end up with conspiracy theories becoming prevalent in the face of scientific knowledge. Conspiracy theorists are fine with science itself, they just have no faith in the results that have been presented to them by certain authorities. That is an important difference.
Faith is not important for science, but it is important for the acceptance of the results of science, when those results are not obvious and easily repeatable by the layperson. Scientific advancement benefits as much from credulity, as you would put it, as religion does.
Re:False Flag (Score:5, Insightful)
Smokers didn't sue their local convenience stores where they bought their smokes, they sued the manufacturers of said tobacco products
What's even more bullshit, is that in this case, it is more like suing the company which built the truck used to haul the cigarettes from the factory to the convenience store. At least the convenience store made the conscious decision to sell cigarettes there. The truck company just built a damn truck, which happens to work on highways and is capable of moving cigarettes.
Re:False Flag (Score:4, Insightful)
"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that?
I don't know about that. It takes a lot of dedicated effort to remain willfully ignorant in today's era of information overload.
"God did it" made reasonably sense when the state of human knowledge was such that we couldn't have known better. And "God did it" is still a reasonable (if unlikely) reason for the Big Bang happening in the first place. People who want to want to reconcile science and religion are welcome to do so on levels like that if it makes them happy.
But trying to claim that the world started 6000 years ago when we can date things back millions or billions of years with proven methods are just out to lunch. The absolutely best they can claim is that the devil (or maybe God himself, to "test" us -- ie: make sure we don't try to use the big old brains He gave us) purposely laced our planet with particular datable isotopes and geographic strata and whatever else the smart people use to (reasonably) accurately date things (accuracy within 1% is a reasonable accuracy in many cases, even if it means a potential real error of a million years, for example.)
Re:False Flag (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to fully disagree with this argument.
Humanity has NEVER had a high percentage of smart, responsible people. And we're still trending towards a smarter populace (more people with at least a BA and such metrics.) Also being a more responsible populace is questionable but that's digressing a bit.
Humanity's cogs have always been the grunts -- they're plentiful and replaceable. But our leaps and bounds have come from the very very few superstars -- the Newtons and Einsteins and Teslas of the world are the ones who progress us.
The rest of us mass of grunts get to benefit from the achievements of the few visionaries and progress marches on. But there's never been a time when more than a fraction of a percent of humanity has been "smart" in the world-moving (even a small corner of the world) sense. There has of course been times when certain factions have tried to suppress the few visionaries that do pop up during their rule.
Overall my point is that visionary intelligence is more likely the genetic mistake among a (comparatively) stupid population rather than some goal we're supposed to be moving towards -- as others have pointed out, evolution favors your reproduction far far more than it favors your contributions to other peoples' lives.
Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
One could also argue that the near ubiquitous availability of porn is simply allowing men to get what they want without a lot of hassle. Namely dating, courtship, and maintenance of a girlfriend/wife who, while attractive, good company, and (hopefully) a very good friend, simply does not live up to the task of keeping the mans sexual drive satisfied.
Porn addiction should be looked at in a couple different directions.The first is the direction that is being talked about so far in this discussion, namely of men who can't control themselves and spiral out of control with an addiction.
Another direction to look is what kind of family life does he have? Does his gf/wife make sure to tend to his needs? Does she care enough about him to get interested in things that he enjoys, sex among them? If there is sex, is it kept interesting? Or has it gotten incredibly stale and any attempts to make it interesting have been failures, either because they just didn't work, or worse, because the woman had no interest in exploring those options and simply expected the man to be satisfied with what he had? Or is this man in a worst case scenario where he has tried his best to find companionship, only to be left out in the cold and judged as not worth anyone's time in a relationship?
What a lot of people need to come to terms with is simply that people have sexual urges. For extensive periods of time our societies have placed a great amount of weight on suppressing those urges and judging them to be "unclean", meaning that only the boldest or most well connected had access to avenues of sexual experimentation. Now with porn literally everywhere, everyone can experience, at least at a distance, almost anything sexually imaginable. The game has changed, quite literally.
With sexual freedom comes a lot of people discovering urges they may never have been able to realize they had. And to be honest up to this point the majority of those people discovering themselves sexually have been men. Women are getting there, but it is taking them longer because of natures built in sexual imbalances. And this is one of the main parts of the problem.
Men have discovered that they want more than to just take a girl out to dinner and a movie on a regular basis, and if they are lucky, they get to have sex on rare occasion. Men have discovered that they want to have sex a lot more often than in the past and women are taking a long time to adapt to these new sexual demands.
Women hold the keys to the sexual kingdom quite closely and refuse to open the gates unless great sacrifice is made in order to get there. Men have simply started to decide that the price of admission is too high, and they are choosing substitutions that are more easily accessible.
As misogynistic as it sounds, the porn problem is caused in part by women making themselves unrealistically unavailable when demand has never been higher. The same thing happens in any high demand, low supply market. High demand and unavailability of any alternatives means everyone competes tooth and nail to pay top dollar for one unit of the coveted item. Then something else that works to satisfy the same demand comes along and suddenly everyone starts to wonder why they're paying out the ass for the cow when the imitation milk is damn near free.
It's simple economics only with sex as the currency. Men want sex but are tired of having to pay for the hassle of dates that may not be enjoyable, relationships that become stale after so long, and escalating costs for lower and lower returns. Until women start to become sexually open as well, porn will continue to be a huge problem for society because men gotta have it, and now they don't need women to get it anymore.
Porn addiction is the end result of mens biological imperative being artificially suppressed for thousands of years by societies that looked down on it and left most men with little to no way of actually expressing it, and suddenly removing that suppression by way of all manner of se
The greatest commandment - love (Score:5, Insightful)
When Jesus was ask what was the greatest commandment, he said "love". Love your neighbor and love God, all the law and the prophets hang on those two, Christ said. So anyone teaching hate toward anyone is teaching the opposite of Christianity.
Certainly that happens, just as the guy selling fake "bomb detectors" claimed science, fools and charlatans sometimes claim God. Their claim is just as bogus though, as Christ clearly directed us to love those who oppose as we love ourselves, even fact even MORE than we love ourselves, love them as he loved us.
Re:The greatest commandment - love (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that Christianity is quite contradictory. It teaches both love and hate. You could just as easily say "The Bible teaches hate, so if anyone tries teaching love, it's the opposite of Christianity". The fact that you choose to ignore the hateful parts of Christianity says more about about you than Christianity. There is enough of varying aspects of Christianity to give plenty of justification to both the hateful and loving Christians.
The same is true for most religions
What do you expect from a man made phenomenon? Why wouldn't it be full of contradictions and both good and evil? It just seems so unremarkable if 2 billion people didn't claim to believe it.
Re:False Flag (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool story bro, but median (raw) IQ scores have been rising for decades if not centuries.
The median IQ score is, by definition, 100....
While the specific skills being taught to obtain that median are different today than they were 200 years ago, I would hardly be as bold as to say that we're smarter today than we were back then. You very likely couldn't survive on your own 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago most likely, because most of us lack skills that would have been considered basic survival. In an agrarian pre-industrial society, your average computer geek would be considered very much a fool.
Case in point, the standard education given 150 years ago included multiple languages, classics, history, literature, logic, and mathematics. In order to graduate from University, you had to be proficient in all of these. Latin and quite often Greek were not optional, nor were the major European languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. Today, we teach a *very* different array of skills as a base point, but it's not any harder or easier for us than it was for them.
About the only basis for your point that actually makes some sense is that nutrition, especially in early childhood, has a *huge* impact on your brain development and performance later in life, but even that's a bit of a failing argument: our nutrition today is worse than it was 50 years ago because of the prevalence of junk food in the modern diet and the sedentary nature of the modern lifestyle.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The greatest commandment - love (Score:4, Insightful)